BBC Breakfast presenter Naga Munchetty has expressed her shock and confusion over misleading articles about her posted by alleged scammers.
The 49-year-old journalist revealed that she’s accustomed to “misleading articles about myself online, but the screenshots I’ve been sent by friends and followers on social media in recent weeks are a lot more insidious than most”.
In an article for BBC News, she explained that she had discovered paid advertisements on X and Facebook featuring explicit fake images of her.
After investigating with the BBC 5 Live team, they found that these adverts led to a counterfeit BBC News website designed to “trick people out of their hard-earned money”.
Munchetty wrote: “I was both mortified and bemused, curious about who would pay good money to spread such obvious nonsense. And what was their motive? Is it something malicious? Someone with an axe to grind?
“I discussed it with my 5 Live production team, and we began to dig into it more. It soon became apparent that my name and image were being used by scammers to try to hoodwink people out of money.”
Fellow BBC presenter Chris Packham also spoke to her on BBC 5 Live about experiencing the same issue on the Bluesky social media site.
He explained that these fake news websites encouraged people to invest in cryptocurrency, exploiting the “authority, the integrity, the credibility” of the BBC and trusted public figures.
Packham labelled the situation as “extraordinarily offensive, and worrying”, expressing his distaste for the idea that vulnerable individuals could be exploited by “some hideous scammers”.
Munchetty revealed that the BBC’s legal team had successfully taken down fake websites using copyright law, but acknowledged that another website would likely emerge soon, and that removing ads from X had become more challenging since its change in ownership.
A Meta spokesperson stated: “People who impersonate others on Facebook and Instagram violate our policies, and we remove this content when it’s found — like we are doing in this case.
“We continue to invest in technology to improve our detection and enforcement against scams and work with law enforcement to prosecute scammers.”
The company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has a strict policy against users impersonating others, misrepresenting their identity to deceive or mislead, violating policies, or evading enforcement. Meta automatically removes accounts that engage in such behaviour and has updated its policies accordingly.
X and Bluesky have been approached for comment.